Other people’s dreams are never interesting…except when they’re about sex. Each week, our dream analyst Lauri Loewenberg tells one lucky reader what their dirty dream means. This week, a reader asks Lauri:

I had the weirdest dream about my ex-boyfriend. He coaches high school basketball and for some reason I was at a game he was coaching. He had a new girlfriend and I had a new boyfriend but for some reason I felt compelled to warn his new girlfriend of what she was getting into…that he was very selfish and unaffectionate, mean, etc. She was nice. Soon my new boyfriend approached me, so I begin to walk away with him leaving the guy. And out of nowhere my ex-boyfriend comes up and hits me so hard in the head, I could feel my head ring. He hit me in front of everyone. I wake up and I’m so disturbed, just thinking he would hit me so hard and with my back turned and in front of everyone. I just don’t know what it means, even in the dream we both moved on, he didn’t know what I had said to his new girlfriend. I woke up and it just made me cry and I felt so embarrassed and hurt.

Please help me to know what that means? I don’t think he would ever hit me like that. When he gets mad he walks away or hangs up on me. He does have a temper but he has never hit me.

Lauri: Don’t worry. This dream does not suggest that he is violent or that he would ever be violent towards you or anyone. Remember, dreams are all about the self and are, in fact, a conversation with the self. Through this dream, you are discussing the relationship with yourself.

The basketball court setting suggests you feel your whole relationship was a game… and he was the one in charge. Do you feel like he was always playing headgames with you? The warning you are giving the new girlfriend is the same warning you had been giving yourself while in the relationship that you probably did not listen to.

When looking back at that relationship do you ever say to yourself, “I wish I had listened to my gut sooner?” You walk away in the dream because, in reality, you finally did walk away from the relationship. He then comes up from behind and hits you. That which is behind you in a dream represents your past. He is indeed a part of your past but you probably only recently realized what was really going on in that relationship.

You know how we say “Oh, it just hit me!” when we have a sudden realization? I believe that’s what this dream is really about. And that is also why he hit you in the head, the head is where we carry our intellect and ideas. It just “hit you” why the relationship was the way it was: just as he is in charge of the game on the court, he also had to be in charge in your relationship and treated it as a game. This dream was very good for you as it was giving you clarity on what went wrong in that relationship so you can avoid the same behaviors in future relationships.